Pumpkins are easy to grow and can give you a huge volume of food. But what grows well with pumpkins? What can you plant near pumpkins that will help them grow better? Are there plants that will not be happy near pumpkins and do pumpkins actually have any companion plants? Will pumpkins choke other tropical …
Growing papayas in the tropics is super easy. Or, at least, I’ve been able to grow them with no problems in a tropical climate so I think you should probably be able to too. Here in Queensland Australia, they call papayas pawpaws. Well, I’m from Europe, they’ll always be papayas to me. Pawpaw is actually …
Essential tips for new gardeners, a top 10 of things you need to know, before starting a garden or setting out to grow your own food. It doesn’t matter where you’re gardening, these 10 tips for new gardeners are great for everyone. Here are our best tips for new gardeners. The most important, is probably …
There are many, many food plants that you can grow from supermarket scraps. Don’t believe anyone who says you can’t. There are way more than I can even mention in this post, but I’ll do my best to tell you how. Once you know how, for different plant, herb, and fruit types, you can try …
Towards the end of 2021, after almost 2 years of lockdown, we bought a farm. A homestead, if you like, a place to settle, our own land, our forever home. Can we guarantee that? No. But we’ll give it a go and if we don’t like farm life, we’ll move on again. So we bought …
How often to water a basil plant depends on many factors. Is the plant small or large and bushy with lush green leaves? Is it in a small pot and is that pot plastic or permeable like terracotta? Is the plant in good soil, rich in organic matter, or is the soil poor and hydrophobic? …
Pineapples are sweet, delicious, golden yellow fruits from tropical regions. If you love to eat pineapple but have only seen it in tins or at the grocery store, this post explains how do pineapples grow, and how to grow pineapples. Pineapples are farmed commercially in our region, field after field of rows of spiky pineapple …
If you grow chillies you’ll know that each plant produces a lot of fruit! Whether you grow chillies indoors or in the tropics, and no matter what variety, your harvest should be plentiful if you have good soil, water, and warmth. For me, chillies grow as a perennial, I have fresh chillies every day of …
In the tropics we really need to mulch. Mulching keeps weeds down, retains moisture, adds nutrients and keeps harsh rain and sun from damaging your soil. I’ve mulched with every imaginable substance, straw, hay, coconut mulch, grass clipping, and now I’ve found the best mulch for my garden. Chop and drop makes the best mulch …
Guppies should do fine in outside pots, ponds, or other containers in a tropical climate. They are very easy to keep, and depending on your set-up need almost no maintenance. Finding a suitable pot or container to keep guppies outside can be tricky, we’ll talk about that, also about maintaining water temperature, filtration, water plants, …
You can grow a lot of herbs in the tropics, including those normally associated with cooler or Mediterranean climates. There are some special tropical herbs that do particularly well, but you should be able to grow most herbs without too much difficulty. This post gives you a list of herbs that can be grown in …
Growing your own food is not just a hobby, it’s an investment. You are investing in future food supplies, in nature, in sustainability, your health, and in your soil. You can save yourself a lot of money by growing a tropical edible garden, and you’ll be helping the planet at the same time. Lets look …
Pigeon peas are the seeds of the pigeon pea plant and they are edible. The Latin name for the species is Cajanus Cajan or Cajanus Indicus.They are a type of lentil, pea, or seed and the pigeon pea plant is a tropical perennial legume of the family Fabaceae. This makes is a very useful, and …
It may surprise you to know that green chillies and red chillies come from the same plant, just one is ripe,and one is picked early. Of course, there are many, many varieties of chilli pepper plant (chile or chili to our US friends, the double l in chilli is the British English version also used …
June is a great month in the garden, it’s winter in the southern hemisphere and a good time to plant just about anything other than the real heat-loving plants. It’s not a good time to sew snake beans or basil, but brassicas will be much happier in winter. What are we planting and harvesting in …
The grapefruit tree (citrus pandisi) in our garden must be ten years old now and it gives us prolific grapefruit every year. This post is about growing grapefruit, caring for a grapefruit tree, types of grapefruit tree, uses for and harvesting grapefruit and as many other grapefruit tree-related facts I can come up with! The …
What’s growing, fruiting, flowering, germinating, and cropping in our tropical food garden in May? May is the last month of autumn where we are. It’s getting towards the start of the tropical dry season, our winter. We are still getting a little rain, the garden isn’t as dry as a chip, yet. At night it’s …
This post is about my experience and things I’ve learned growing tomatoes in the tropics. Yes, of course you can grow tomatoes in the tropics, but it’s a little different to growing cherry, heirloom, grape, beefsteak and slicer tomatoes in more temperate climates. I grew up growing tomatoes in a temperate environment, where winters didn’t …
What’s growing, fruiting, flowering, germinating, and cropping in our tropical food garden in December? December is the first month of summer where we are. It’s also the tropical wet season This means it’s going to be super-interesting to see what effect torrential rain, less sun, and waterlogging or even soil erosion will have on what’s …
Can you grow pumkins in the tropics? Yes you can grow pumpkins in the tropics and they grow very well indeed. Pumpkins are possibly the easiest vegetable to grow in a tropical climate and they produce a huge weight of food. You need to choose the right variety of pumkin and know a few tricks …
What’s going on in the tropical food garden in October? October for us, here in the Southern Hemisphere, just 16 degrees south of the equator, is still spring officially, but it feels like full summer to me .October is a month of abundance in the garden, temperatures have climbed so much that we start to …
What’s growing, fruiting, flowering, germinating, and cropping in our tropical food garden in September. That’s the first month of spring where we are. By the end of the first week of September the days were starting to get unpleasantly hot. For the first time I could feel summer coming and dreading it, honestly. There was …
May is the last month of autumn for us but already it’s getting a bit chilly at night. If you can call 20 degrees C chilly! Days are still hot and we’re still having a little rain, but the dry season is around the corner. We’re still eating tropical vegetables and fruits like aubergines (eggplant), …
In November in the southern hemisphere tropics the heat is building for us and rain is scarce at the beginning of the month. By November we’re hiding from the heat indoors and only venture outside very early or around sunset. The rains can arrive in late November but the start of the month is usually …
What’s with snake beans and green ants? As soon as the first flowers appeared on our snake bean plants the green ants were there clustered around the flowers and setting up home in the leaves. Until those flowers appeared ( in July, first bean harvest August for us) there had been no green ants at …
What’s growing, fruiting, flowering, germinating, and cropping in our tropical food garden in August. Remember, we’re in the southern hemisphere, just 16 degrees south of the Equator, you may have to flip the seasons if you’re in the tropics in the northern hemisphere. August is the last month of winter for us and we’re into …
Yes, you can make your own fertiliser for your plants at home, easily. It can even be free. Making your own fertiliser for garden plants using various methods. One of the first steps in gardening is to fix, improve, or at least understand your soil. You won’t grow much with bad soil but there are …
What are we are picking, harvesting, and planting here in tropical Queensland in July. Every year we will update this post as our garden grows and matures, we have a post like it for every month. As we are in the southern hemisphere July is one of our cooler, drier months, mid-winter, but we’ve turned …
Gardening in the tropics is different. It’s not as easy as many gardeners in cooler climates might think. We in the tropics have to deal with phenomenal amounts of rain that can wash away soil and nutrients, change soil pH and leave food plants sitting in a swamp. We have to learn new techniques to …